§ Statement of Purpose

The View from 1776 presents a framework to understand present-day issues from the viewpoint of the colonists who fought for American independence in 1776 and wrote the Constitution in 1787. Knowing and preserving those understandings, what might be called the unwritten constitution of our nation, is vital to preserving constitutional government. Without them, the bare words of the Constitution are just a Rorschach ink-blot that politicians, educators, and judges can interpret to mean anything they wish.

"We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John Adams, to the Officers of the First Brigade, Third Division, Massachusetts Militia, October 11, 1798.

§ American Traditions

§ People and Ideas

§ Decline of Western Civilization: a Snapshot

§ Books to Read

§ BUY MY BOOK

Saturday, February 28, 2015

The Nature Of Evidence

Some leading advocates of man-made global warming and of regulatory actions to terminate use of the world’s cheapest and most efficient sources of energy admit the truth: it’s a secular religion masquerading as science.

We are repeatedly told by President Obama and mainstream media that all the world’s scientists support the global-warming tenet. This is a lie in the nature of, “If you like your health insurance and your present doctor you can keep them.” Increasingly so-called evidence of global warming is steadily being revealed as creation of fraudulent data or mendacious manipulation of data.

Friday, February 20, 2015

Restoring The Unwritten Constitution

Liberal-progressivism, exemplified in President Obama, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, is aimed at destroying the essence of constitutionalism that gave birth to the United States.

Intellectuals since the so-called Age of Enlightenment have theorized that political societies are merely projections of ruler’s minds and that a ruler, or ruling intellectual elite, can make of a society whatever it wishes. Liberal-progressives’ atheistic materialism leads to their faith that whatever exists is the product of rational minds and, therefore, rational minds can change things at will in order to perfect them.

In the materialistic world view dominating society today, no weight is given to the essentiality of spiritual matters expressed in religion and societal cultures, from the tribal level to national states. Liberal-progressivism emanating from the corrupting continental European so-called Aage of Enlightenment propounds the faith that reality is only what is perceptible by human sensory organs. From this flows the hubristic assurance that intellectuals, having transcended the ignorance and superstition of the Judeo-Christian foundation of Western civilization, have conquered nature and are able to shape it to their vision of societal perfection.

Lenin envisioned the brutal force of collectivized tyranny as creating the New Soviet Man, a creature who would selflessly give his all for society, asking in return only what he needed to live in a classless society. Today we see the same hubristic certainty expressed in liberal-progressive collectivism evidenced in regulatory homogenization ranging from President Johnson’s Great Society to ObamaCare and President Obama’s regulatory assault on production and use of coal, petroleum, and natural gas. Resistance from half or more of voters persists, because liberal-progressivism ignores the essentiality and power of spiritual religion as a primary source of morality, respect for constitutional authority, duty to family, community, and national patriotism.

No weight is given to historical precedent. There is no sense that political order is the product of centuries of accumulated adjustments and understandings among people who constitute the society. There is no sense that societies do not survive without a set of core beliefs and principles to which almost everyone subscribes.
Nations don’t survive because government welfare programs provide them material goods. Nations survive because people share a common vision and are willing to work hard and, if necessary, to fight for that vision.

The statement of purpose for this website puts it this way:

The View from 1776 presents a framework to understand present-day issues from the viewpoint of the colonists who fought for American independence in 1776 and wrote the Constitution in 1787. Knowing and preserving those understandings, what might be called the unwritten constitution of our nation, is vital to preserving constitutional government. Without them, the bare words of the Constitution are just a Rorschach ink-blot that politicians, educators, and judges can interpret to mean anything they wish.

In the United States, immigration abetted by multiculturalism is corrupting society’s unwritten constitution, which is the positive embodiment of the spirit that animates a society and gives it a driving force of unity in belief and national aims.

No society can survive without a consensus about right and wrong, about what constitutes moral conduct. That consensus is the unwritten constitution of society, the content that gives meaning to a written constitution, the meat on the bones of the structure of government.

Without that consensus there can be only a disparate group of people with little or no attachment to their new homes. That is what we see increasingly, here , under the impact of a tsunami of immigration from alien cultures and religions.

It’s not immigrants who are undermining the unwritten constitution, however. The source of corruption is liberal-progressive beliefs, endlessly preached in our multicultural educational system and the mainstream media, that the United States is, and has always been, a corrupt, oppressive society conceived by the rich to plunder the American public and the rest of the world.

Accommodating immigration is both a major means of survival for the United States and a device for liberal-progressives to recruit new voters (including illegals) for the Democrat/Socialist Party. Immigrants have become a major source of new business and employment creation and the source of the higher birth rate needed to keep the United States from becoming a replica of western Europe: an aging society of dwindling numbers of young workers to support the burden of rising welfare-state obligations.

Combining the huge flood of immigration with a liberal-progressive ethos of rootless multiculturalism sets the stage for disintegration of American society more effectively than terrorist attacks by Islamic jihadists. No longer is education viewed as a melting pot to teach our history and the principles of our government.
Without the pre-existing unwritten constitution of 1776, which Jefferson said was the source of his words in the Declaration of Independence, our written Constitution has become vulnerable to destructive distortion by activist judges and liberal-progressive educators.

Judeo-Christian traditions of right and wrong underlie the unwritten constitution that prevailed in 1776. Those traditions taught generations of Americans that every person should always do his best to do the right thing, even if doing so did not benefit him personally. A flood of judicial decisions since the 1950s reveals, however, that doing away with precepts of right and wrong is one of the primary objectives of liberal-socialism.

The “me” generation of the Baby Boomer era were taught that the only standard is immediate gratification of their sensual urges. Hence today’s generally accepted belief that sexual promiscuity, murdering babies via abortion, drug abuse, biological fathers abandoning partners and the children they father, and living off the welfare state are acceptable life styles.

Thursday, February 05, 2015

Is The President A Law Unto Himself?

England’s Stuart kings’ repeated efforts to bypass Parliament and to proclaim laws unilaterally led to the Glorious Revolution of 1689 deposing James II and to Parliament’s enacting the English Bill of Rights, the precursor to our own first ten amendments to the Constitution.

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Even Great Britain Admits That “Warmest Year” Is Unconfirmed

The UK has been one of the staunchest advocates of global warming and the need to wreck the economy with energy strangulation, on the assumption that liberal-progressive minds have god-like powers to control the universe. God-created nature, however, has for the last couple of decades failed to bend to liberal-progressive minds.

Sunday, January 25, 2015

What Hath The Fed Wrought?

City Journal columnist Nicole Gelinas gives us a brief overview of the Fed’s failure to deal with the economy’s real problem: too much debt, in 2008, and still today. The implicit assumption underlying Obama administration policies and those of the Fed is that the way to deal with people who have more debt than they can repay is to encourage them to borrow still more money.

The “wealth effect” created by the Keynesian economic policies of former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke succeeded only in booming the stock market, enriching wealthy bankers, hedge fund operators, and speculators. Retirees and lower-income ranks of workers have been trashed by near-zero interest rate returns on their savings.

The productive economy has labored for nearly eight years under increasing governmental regulatory strangulation and deficit spending financed largely by the Fed’s quantitative easement, government-bond-buying policy. Recent slow gains in economic activity have been made, despite Obama’s administrative regulatory policies and constant threats of more regulation and higher taxes. In fact, the biggest engine of economic recovery has been hydrofracking to produce more petroleum and natural gas, which the Obama administration has sought to kill off and replace with government-subsidized efforts to force use of “green” energy.

Climate Reporting’s Hot MessAP takes the cake in the relentless campaign by global-warming journalists to discredit their own profession.

By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.
Jan. 20, 2015 8:07 p.m. ET

News reporting of the latest climate alarm was not uniformly bad. Among hundreds of publications in the Factiva database, exactly one—the Mail on Sunday, one of those derided London tabloids—injected the phrase “statistically significant” into consideration of whether 2014 was in any meaningful sense the “hottest year on record.”

A nonjournalistic source and not exactly an outfit of climate-change deniers, Berkeley Earth, also noted that, when it comes to 2014 and the other “hottest year” candidates, 2005 and 2010, the observed temperature difference was smaller than the margin of error by a factor of five, adding: “Therefore it is impossible to conclude from our analysis which of 2014, 2010, or 2005 was actually the warmest year.”

To its credit, the Washington Post alluded to the possibly more important fact that “rising temperatures have not kept pace with computer simulations that predicted even faster warming.”

The New York Times contributed nothing to reader enlightenment as usual, and the Associated Press committed a howler by claiming that “nine of the 10 hottest years in NOAA global records have occurred since 2000. The odds of this happening at random are about 650 million to 1, according to University of South Carolina statistician John Grego. ”

This might be true if Earth’s climate were dice, where rolling a six has no effect on the odds of the next roll being a six. But climate is a continuous process of incremental change. A unified theory of media idiocy on climate is beyond the scope of this column, but even someone with the apparently parched intellect of an AP editor should be able to look at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration charts and notice that cool years are grouped with cool years, warm years with warm years, and in-between years with in-between years.

Either NOAA’s entire temperature history is a statistical anomaly of incomprehensible, galactic proportions—or AP has peddled itself a faulty assumption. And sure enough, Mr. Grego tells me AP specifically instructed him to assume “all years had the same probability of being ‘selected’ as one of the 10 hottest years on record.” This is akin to assuming that, because you weighed 195 pounds at some point in your life, there should be an equal chance of you weighing 195 pounds at any point in your life, even when you were a baby.

The real mystery, though, would be if the warmest years did not bunch up in the post-1998 period, given the sharp warming observed from the late 1970s to the late 1990s.

When climate reporters robotically insist, as they did again this week, that the 2000s represent the hottest period in the rather skimpy, 134-year historical record, they are merely reiterating that the pre-1998 warming happened. No clear trend up or down has been apparent since then.

The bigger problem, of course, is that evidence of warming is not evidence of what causes warming. One would be astonished if mankind, with its prodigious release of greenhouse gases and other activities, were not having an impact on climate. But how and how much are the crucial questions.

But all this is magisterially beside the point in a sense. If the decades have validated any set of propositions, it’s the following: Mankind is unlikely to do anything meaningful about carbon dioxide as a matter of concerted public policy, and anything it does will be in the service of domestic pork interests, having no impact on climate.

Even if humanity could assert bureaucratic control over climate, the cost-benefit case would remain problematic—the costs being huge and the benefits necessarily being as uncertain as man’s role in causing climate change.

A carbon tax as part of pro-growth tax reform is one measure that might pass a cost-benefit test, thanks mainly to the nonclimate benefits of tax reform. Alas, no sign exists that a quorum of countries is ready to march together down this road. President Obama this week decided to use the tax-reform opportunity to pursue partisan class-warfare themes rather than advance a carbon tax proposal in exchange for lower rates.

So the climate problem, if there’s a problem, likely won’t be solved by some supreme effort of global bureaucratic will. But one could easily imagine it being solved by the normal, unwilled progress of technology. A battery—pick a number—five or 10 times more efficient than today’s, holding more energy and charging and discharging faster, would so revolutionize world energy practices that scientists would have to consider how a sudden decline in human carbon-dioxide emissions might affect the climate.

Solar and wind collection don’t have to be particularly efficient if storage becomes efficient. More solar energy reaches the earth’s surface in a year than is contained in all remaining reserves of fossil fuels and uranium. And to the inventor the financial and reputational rewards would be extravagant—which explains why billions of dollars are flowing into battery research.